Among other things, we discussed the politics of symmetry as it is used in science and technology studies (STS); STS literature from the 1980s that already moved away from the lab-field dichotomy; the differences between sumud (steadfastness), stasisand resilience; cartography in 14th-century Mediterranean city states; and the relationship between hermeneutics and the production of knowledge.

It was great to speak to them both because they’re two people whose work I really respect. See for example Annalisa’s research on the vectorial glance, or in her words: “a performative and ‘infrastructurally inverted’ approach to investigate how authority and accountability are redistributed throughout integrated government information systems.” Also see Chunglin’s extensive scholarship, including his work on ecology and landscape–for example his study of different conceptions of complexity in the history of science.

That reminds me: if you happen to be thinking about paying a genetic testing service so you can give them your data, before you swab your cheek, first check out Cybergenetics, the wonderful and theoretically rich book by Anna Harris, Susan Kelly, and Sally.

]]>jessbierWTMC annual meeting our panelhttps://jessbier.org/2017/10/26/1761/
Thu, 26 Oct 2017 15:37:45 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=1761Continue reading →]]>This blog is a collection of research updates, rough ideas, and harebrained schemes that I won’t have a chance to work through in the near future. I’ll publish some of these eventually if there’s time. My more polished work can be found via the “Publications” link in the menu at top right. Topics include:

critical social theory

power and geographic space

the politics of maps and boundaries

digital infrastructures

urban landscapes and gentrification

automated logistics

the history of shipping in the 20th century

the production of landscape

human-made islands and terrain

undersea mapping and bathymetry

race, gender, class, ancestry, and sexuality

colonialism and postcolonialism

the framing and composition of public debate

disaster recovery, especially body recovery

alternative imaginations of the globe

parks, zoos, camps, conventions, and world exhibitions

the social role of statistics and statistical models

financial crises and radical accounting

the visualization of outer space

theories of space and time

speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy literature

utopia and dystopia

]]>jessbierOrcing the Otherhttps://jessbier.org/2017/10/16/orcing-the-other/
Mon, 16 Oct 2017 11:22:57 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=1718Continue reading Orcing the Other→]]>The Power Dynamics of Role Playing

The celebrated author N.K. Jemisin has written about her problem with orcs, which is related to the ways that orcs build on racist stereotypes. In her words:

“Think about that. Creatures that look like people, but aren’t really. Kinda-sorta-people, who aren’t worthy of even the most basic moral considerations, like the right to exist. Only way to deal with them is to control them utterly a la slavery, or wipe them all out.”

On twitter, Jemisin also shared Matthew Gault’s article on why he found it too disturbing to continue playing a game where the entire point is to manipulate, control, and enslave orcs.

Orcs, most famously in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, could be thought of as evil magical minions, but I’m not sure this does justice to the particularly horrendous role they are given, at least in many incarnations where they exist only to be killed. (There is a parallel here with the role of ‘terrorists’ in US action films as the embodiment of orientalist stereotypes of Arab people. See the work of Jack Shaheen as well as Jackie Salloum’s disturbing short film Planet of the Arabs.) So it’s worth thinking in more depth about orcs, and though them, the politics of racism in fantasy games and literature in more detail.

Not Being an Orc Any Longer

Given the particular problems of orcishness, I’ve been thinking more about the issues of taking on the roles of others in games. It’s not uncommon now to be able to take on the role of the orc as your main character. Although, I don’t have a lot of time to devote to gaming, but when I do play, I often end up playing the orc because it’s the only slightly masculine female character. It’s so common that I even started referring to gaming as ‘being an orc’.

Jemisin’s post reminded me that, as a white person, my ‘being an orc’ is problematic in several ways. These stem from a combination of racism and sexism. As Gamergate demonstrated (not that it wasn’t already patently obvious), sexism is also widespread in gaming. There are ongoing critiques of the hypersexualization of female characters in games, including efforts to get designers to retire that infamous article of clothing that no warrior would ever actually wear: boob armor. But too often discussions of sexism by white gamers are divorced from examinations of race and ancestry, and white narratives, mythology, and characters as the ‘default’ option.

But given how the character of the orc draws on racist stereotypes, by playing the orc I’m adopting and furthering those stereotypes. That means that I’m choosing racism over sexism, taking on a gaming sanctioned form of Blackface to avoid being shoe-horned into a hyper feminine character. But there are even more layers to this, and they’re related to the ways racism and sexism intersect.

The racism of orcs is also an additional form of sexism for at least three reasons. First, as extensive scholarshp has shown, dominant standards of beauty in Europe and North America have long been built on a white ideal. This means that women of color characters are less likely to be seen as feminine even if they have many traditionally ‘feminine’ traits. Second, the racist association of women of color with nature, and stereotypes about powerful Black bodies (in the negative, as in out of control and violent) are clearly also mapped onto Orcs. This leads to depictions of female orcs as potentially more ‘masculine’, and to them being seen as more masculine as well (inclduing by me). Third, there is also a history of women of color, and Black women in particular becoming a kind of repository for the Other, so this might also lead to the game designers giving female orcs nontraditional gender characteristics, as well as other kinds of Othered characteristics related to class, ability and disability, and so on.

So the female orcs’ femininity are less likely to be included in the definition of the feminine, which has long been based on white femininity. In addition, the orcs are less likely to be seen as feminine even when they are given traditionally feminine traits, and finally, non-traditional characteristics (including masclune gender) are more likely to be given to them overall.

What this means is that by playing the orc I’m not only choosing racism over sexism. Instead I’m choosing racism-sexism (racism and sexism against women of color), instead of sexism against white women. And that’s not something I’m willing to do, which means that it’s time to go back to playing the crappy elves, or some other such character. (Apologies to elf fans everywhere.) In games like Skyrim pretty much every character is a racial or ethnic stereotype of some kind (including most obviously, Latinx, and middle eastern people, respectively), but given the ongoing horrendous treatment of Black people in the US and Europe, the positioning of orcs is especially heinous–and this with the understanding that Skyrim is better than many games and other media out there. It also means I’ll try to support diverse creators so that this kind of choice isn’t necessary in the future.

On Being Another

Beyond being an orc, thinking about playing the orc also brought up the problematics of people playing the Other in gaming, and online more broadly. Ever since the early days of internet chat rooms in the 1990s, there were ongoing scares about people ‘misrepresenting’ themselves online. Just one example: the early episode of Buffy the vampire Slayer where Willow meets Malcolm online, and he turns out to be a demon. For certain, people have been assaulted and murdered via any number of online bait-and-switch tactics that involve one party claiming to be someone else.

But from early in the wider adoption of the internet, people in online communities defended the ability to become someone else, and this certainly was liberating for some, particularly in queer communities where it was sometimes possible to be out anonymously online, if not offline. Gaming amplifies this in problematic ways, however. For example, there were the cases of bloggers claiming to be, for example an Arab lesbian kidnapped in Syria, but who turns out to be a white guy from Scotland. So although the notion of fluid identity online might seem progressive at first glance, and indeed in certain circumstances it could be, it is important to be attentive to the role of power in such exchanges. In light of the legacies of colonialism and racism, whites, and especially white men, mistakenly believe we have a right to access to everything, including the personal experiences of the people oppress. So, some people are more free to be other than themselves, to take on others’ experiences.

In addition, in gaming some people have long been forced to take on the role of another (if not THE Other), because of the lack of representation in the media. Many of us have long had to take on the role of a white man because that was the only option available. That has a different dynamic than, for example, a white man playing a character who’s a woman of color. For one, a man playing a woman, or a white person playing a character who is a person of color, is not necessarily progressive. It smacks of voyeurism in a variety of ways. For one, in a universe where female characters are scantily dressed, a straight man might play a female character simply to starte at a nearly naked woman. That is what it is, but it’s arguably not about trying to understand her perspective. And it is jarring in this world, where a hypersexualized female characters, in stories told by male creators, are often the only option.

But even if one’s intentions are progressive, playing the Other can still backfire. People indeed might play other characters partly out of curiosity about others’ experiences in a media climate where diverse experiences have long been systematically represented, even if there are some counternarratives out there. In a society where racism, sexism, etc. are the default way to be, then it’s possible, and even likely, that the plot of the game is itself deeply racist and sexist, or that at the very least it doesn’t take into account the diversity of possible main characters. In those cases, even if your character is diverse in some way, you end up parroting a dominant script. So then taking on a diverse character gives the illusion that you’re ‘understanding’ something about that character, when you’re actually just reinforcing roles that have no nuance, and no difference of perspective. This is arguably true in games like Mass Effect 3, where it’s possible to be a female Shepard, but where the game only changes slightly as a result.

An Imbalance of Discomfort

But even if it were possible to write the most progressive game on the planet, in terms of characters and plot, one where diverse creators were involved all along the way, there’s still an affective awareness of difference that affects how one plays another’s character. Jemisin’s analysis of orcs in literature demonstrates an inherent disconcertment with orcs that likely comes at least in part from her experiences in US society. Although I’m intellectually and personally aware of such issues, and was conscious of the racialization of orcs, it’s still indicative that, as a white person, this didn’t stop me from taking on the role of the orc in order to try to contend with my gender and its largely absent representation in dominant media writ large. In cases where it’s possible to play masculine white women (Mass Effect), that’s what I do. But in cases where that wasn’t an option, I adopted a character with racist overtones to accommodate my nontraditional gender, because as a white person–even one who has thought about these issues for much of my life–my level of discomfort with racism is less sensitive than my disconcertment with race.

This imbalance of discomfort matters, and it’s important to be aware of differences in disconcertment at a very fundamental level. Of course, there are games out there whose narratives deal explicitly with racism. The Assassin’s Creed universe is basically founded on the idea that gamers, and indeed the main characters of the games themselves, can take on the personae of their ancestors from vastly different period of history. The characters of Aveline de Grandpré and Adéwalé do attempt to contend with slavery in ways that are fully integrated into the game. It’s possible to critique the way this is done, and how successful it is or is not. But, there is at least an effort to include the experiences into the game. So playing one of these characters might be an opportunity to engage with the horrors of slavery, however imperfectly and fleetingly. Even so, and even if it the game’s narrative were entirely successful, that also doesn’t change the lifetime of experiences that I, as a white person, have had and will have, aside from the few days or weeks that I spend playing the game. So a game, a story, a film, can be useful, but it will never be a panacea. This isn’t to underestmiate the very real importance of representation, only to remind myself, and fellow people who have some form of privilege: we can be aware of differences, but we will never really know how it feels from the other side.

On Not Reclaiming the Orc

So an understanding of the Other will always be imperfect, and maybe that’s even for hte best. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that it might somehow ‘truly’ possible to understand another’s experiences. In short, it’s gross. It seems like an invasive, even violent act since, taken to an extreme, that would involve inheriting all of their memories, moods, and sensations stretching back until the day they were born. But particularly from a position of privilege, it is necessary to make a greater effort to see things from other peoples’ perspectives, particularly to listen when they’re trying to explain them to you. Indeed, this is one of the main goals of both literature and ethnographic writing. Playing a game or reading a novel won’t erase privilege. But pointing out the imperfect understanding is also not a get-out-of-jail-free card, not a free pass to stop listening. Indeed, done well, listening might make you more deeply aware of the existence of other perspectives, and with some serious, ongoing, imperfect effort, that awareness might ultimately help lead to privilege’s undoing.

Jemisin is understandably wary of the ability to reclaim the orc, despite numerous efforts. (See the comments on her above post, and the related conversation on twitter). So let me close with the only reclamation of the orc that I’m able to imagine. It’s a story I could write, one adapted from Jorge Luis Borges’s “Averroe’s Search“:

An orc starts to remember that she is human, that her ancestors were ripped from her family and subjugated as slaves. She remembers that she came from a great society, maybe from Ife, maybe from countless others in Africa and beyond. She remembers lost languages. She remembers names, and hills, and homes. And amid the inundation of thoughts, impressions, and sensations, she tries to remember one more feeling: the feeling of not knowing slavery, of coming of age unaffected by its forms of subjugation. But in that moment, in that attempt to know full emancipation, she is no longer an orc. She is as she has always been, a person that far exceeds any imposed orcish characteristics. In that moment, the figure of the orc evaporates. And my pretension to write about the orc, to even pretend to put myself in the position of an orc, evaporates with it.

]]>jessbierThe book exists!https://jessbier.org/2017/08/02/the-book-exists/
Wed, 02 Aug 2017 16:47:36 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=1619Continue reading The book exists!→]]>My first book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge has just been published by the MIT Press. The MIT page has a summary and quotes from Laleh Khalili and Stefan Helmreich, two people whose work I really admire.

The book is available online via independent bookstores in the Netherlands and the US, and it’s also on all of the larger sites, like Amazon, which has a Kindle version. I’m very grateful to my family, advisors, colleagues, and everyone at MIT who made it possible.

It’s an academic book that makes the theoretical argument that geographic and political landscapes (where we are) influence knowledge (what we know). Those landscapes don’t simply exist independently of humans, however. Instead they are shaped and worked over through social and political processes, like efforts to establish and enforce political borders or the boundaries of land ownership. So I argue that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has shaped the landscape, and through that the content of maps and geographic knowledge, in very specific ways that I explore in the book.

This book grew out of my dissertation at Maastricht University. Of course like any project, there wasn’t room for a good part of the fieldwork and research in the final manuscript. So if you’re interested in the book and related issues, then keep watching this blog. My current work explores things like how society and space are shaped by economic systems, like global capitalism and logistical chains, and socio-technical ones like data and internet infrastructure.

I’ve been thinking about the international circulation of racist expertise. James Q. Whitman has published a new book, Hitler’s American Model. It’s about how the Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s studied the racist legal system of the United States as part of their efforts to take away the rights of German Jews, which paved the way to the genocide of the Holocaust.* Reading about the book, I was reminded of the Israeli geographer David Amiran, another international expert who studied the US South, albeit during a ten-day trip to throughout the Jim Crow South of the 1950s.

To be clear, I don’t know of any systematic effort on the part of Israeli government officials to use US laws as a model for the Israeli legal system. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but I have done no research on the subject, and at the time of this writing don’t know of anyone who has. What I did come across in my research on maps in Palestine and Israel, was the concerted effort to use international population censuses, including the national censuses from the US, the UK, and the Netherlands in particular, as models for the Israeli population censuses of the 1960s and 1970s. Such later efforts would be aided by the international contacts of Israeli academics, contacts that were formed in no small part during conference trips like the one Amiran took.

It is not at all surprising that Israeli officials used other censuses as models for their own. When starting something new–or in the cases I saw, revising it significantly–it makes sense to look to existing examples. The selection of the countries used as models is certainly interesting, however. For it demonstrates, among other things, the close ties between Israel and countries in Europe and North America. Countries in those economically and politically doinant regions were seen as being technologically advanced in ways that obscured their legacies of political injustice, for example through colonialism and the racist legal systems that included Jim Crow.

So it was partly to strengthen their international networks that Israeli researchers, like many researchers who have the privilege to do so, traveled to academic conferences. And it was as a member of a formal excursion organized in relation to one conference, run by the International Geographical Union in Washington DC in 1952, that David Amiran went to the US South. At the time, David Amiran’s contacts with the US were already influential in helping to establish post-1948 Israeli academia. Amiran was a prominent Israeli geographer of Lithuanian background who was trained in his native Germany (Freiburg). He followed that training with work in Russia and a PhD in Switzerland. He was also one of three founders of the discipline of geography at Hebrew University after 1949, and in 1977 he went on to receive the Israel Prize, arguably the highest honor awarded by the state of Israel. So the notes that he took in his travel diary for the trip are part of a broader academic relationship between Israel an the US.

But before turning to Amiran’s notes, first a caveat about language. Language is important to understanding the kind of notes Amiran was making during his trip. His travel diaries for this trip in particular are in English. This is important because his notebooks are usually almost exclusively in Hebrew and, less commonly, German. From what I can tell, his use of English on this trip indicates both that he was speaking more English while in the US, and also that he was in large part writing down almost verbatim what the tour guides (two professors from the University of Georgia) told the group, and adding very little commentary of his own. So the text of the diaries doesn’t necessarily represent Amiran’s own words, but in the diaries he doesn’t contradict the guides’ statements either.

During the trip, Amiran was absorbing dominant white narratives about US slavery and the Jim Crow South. The arguments he presents in the diary will be familiar to anyone who’s come across contemporary white supremacist arguments about US slavery. Namely, and apparently parroting his tour guides, he denies the overwhelming horrors of past slavery and present systemic inequalities under Jim Crow. In his diary, Amiran writes that the average Black agricultural worker in the South earns “the same wages as a white one.” He also refers to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “nonsense” because African American slaves, “being valuable property” were “well treated and adequately fed, housed etc.–but not more than just adequately.” So in one sentence from one trip, he apparently helps gives in to the erasure of the long legacy of horrendous violence against people of color in the United States, and Blacks in particular.

Amiran combines these racist statements with classist ones, both for American Blacks and for poor white sharecroppers or as he calls them: “the ‘Poor White Trash’ type, the most backwards imaginable.” He disparages them for sitting on their porches all day and working “only when they do not feel like not-working,” an attitude that one of Amrian’s guides, here explicitly noted, attributes to the sharecropper’s “backwardness” and later, possibly in Amiran’s own words, the effects of malaria and a bad diet “through generations”. Of course, from a sharecropper’s perspective, it might seem that “not-working” was the most rational option for sharecroppers who carried out backbreaking, thankless work, to possibly only end up more indebted and malnourished at the end of the day, not to mention the difficulty of finding work at all. Later Amiran draws a diagram of a trailer in a trailer park, which at that time may have seemed like a hi-tech and modern housing arrangement.

What’s revealing about Amiran’s travel diary is that the racist Jim Crow laws and related extreme forms of segregation don’t appear anywhere in it. The well documented and oppressive legal and geographical system of racial discrimination is absent from his experience although, presumably, he was eating in “Whites Only” restaurants, drunking from “Whites Only” water fountains, and going to the bathroom in “Whites Only” toilets. This is particularly notable given that Amiran was an adult during the period of the Holocaust, which he spent outside of Germany. In addition, he was traveling through the South at a time when Jews in the US were struggling to be categorized as racially White. So it wouldn’t be unusual to expect some sensitivity from Amiran–who doubtless dealt with severe forms of anti-Semitism during his life–for the African Americans who were the explicit targets of both Atlantic slavery and de facto legalized Jim Crow segregation, whose injustices are felt in the US up to the present day. Instead, during the trip Amiran appears to have been granted access to whiteness–conditioned no doubt by his German upbringing, Lithuanian background and status as a professor. And the wages of that whiteness were ignorance.

As such, while his travel diary also sheds light on the ongoing Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Amiran’s trip also reveals something about the culture of dominant international academia, and of tourism more broadly. The general idea is that travel will broaden your horizons, and that certainly is a possibility, but there’s also always the danger that it will only reinforce our pre-existing ideas and dominant narratives of a particular place or region–as Mary Louise Pratt explores for colonial travel narratives in her book, Imperial Eyes.

So traveling differently is incredibly important, as is a willingness to be open and reflexive, and to do the work of seeing more than simply the most obvious destinations–or of seeing those obvious destinations in a new light. But this is also incredibly difficult to do. Indeed studies of the politics of alternative tourism, ecotourism, and international volunteering are, and deserve to be, a field in their own right. And activists and scholars of social justice have been arguing for years: innovating in methods of listening and learning are every bit as difficult, and every bit as crucial to theory, as the most abstract analytical and technical research. Amiran’s trip to the Jim Crow South cannot be divorced from the broader role he played, through both the military and academia, in the violent exclusion of Palestinians as part of the establishment and entrenchment of the state of Israel. Nonetheless, it shows how a moment for an opening–a trip to the most famously segregated and racially charged region in the world–might have been a chance to rethink such an approach to statehood, and indeed to life. Instead, for Amiran at least, the trip just represented oppression as usual.

Cartoon from a 1949 Israeli military (IDF) guide to reading maps and aerial photos, published at a time when David Amiran was the deputy commander of the IDF’s mapping and aerial photography unit.

*My thanks go to Rogier van Reekum for bringing the book to my attention and suggesting I write a post about Amiran’s travels.

]]>jessbierThe Cover of Whitma's book, "Hitler's American Model"Image: a cropped close-up of two pages of Amiran's diary that describes cotton production and the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It shows the yellowed pages and his blocky cursive handwriting.Image: Amiran's diagram of a housing trailer. It shows a large rectangle with smaller rectangles inside it. The large rectangle is the trailer, and the smaller rectangles are the pieces of furniture (beds, sofa, table, etc.).A cartoon on aged, yellowed paper of a soldier with a backpack and gun reading a map while he steps, unnoticing, off of a cliff. The implication is that he's looking at the map but forgetting to look around him at where he's walking.Feminizing Urban Studieshttps://jessbier.org/2017/05/22/feminizing-urban-studies/
Mon, 22 May 2017 14:00:03 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=1176Continue reading Feminizing Urban Studies→]]>Last week Marguerite van den Berg organized the excellent workshop, “Feminizing the City?” at the University of Amsterdam with Linda Peake, who also gave a lecture. The workshop focused on the (lack of) overlap between urban studies and feminist theory, and Willem Boterman and I were the discussants.

During the workshop, Linda Peake spoke about her important critique (also in work with Martina Reiker) of Neil Brenner and Christian Schimd’s work on planetary urbanization, which is itself a critique of the notion that we now live in an Urban Age. Notably, Peake stresses the connection between theory and the conditions of knowledge production. In a very practical sense, it’s difficult to have a total theory of the urban when academia itself is severely limited, both in terms of being Anglo- and American-centric, and being rather myopically centered in the global North. Similarly, Peake and Reiker argue that urban studies has historically been bifurcated into studies of cities in the global South, in relation to development, and studies of cities in the global North, in relation to modernization, and that the scholars from each body of literature don’t talk to each other.

In a future post, I hope to discuss the consequences of these kinds of omissions and bifurcations. I particularly am thinking about how it’s possible to know something at a planetary scale, and how much is unknown about planetary scales. For now, I want to point to Marguerite’s excellent book, Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban, which was also launched during the workshop, and in which she analyzes the instrumental use of gender in urban planning and policy, for example in how cities sell themselves. I can’t recommend the book highly enough for anyone interested in cities, and in the politics of the overlap between gender and the capitalist marketing of cities. On a theoretical level, it also forcefully counters the tendency of (non-feminist) urban studies theorists to treat gender as an add-on, or a something that is not integral to theories of the city.

Update: You can now also read about the workshop on the Dress and Work project blog.

Privilege is a complex concept that has different meanings in specific contexts. I’m just back from the Judith Butler conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and one of Butler’s responses to a question has stuck with me when thinking about intersectionality, specifically in terms of how feminism, racial justice, and postcolonialism interrelate. After her public lecture, Butler was asked why she speaks of inequalities of power more often than of privilege. During her reply, she noted that (broadly paraphrasing here) privilege is a social attribute, something that you bear, like a heavy load. I took this to mean that she doesn’t like the term because she feels it incorrectly implies that inequality is simply superficial. If you just carry privilege around, instead of being infused with it, then it mistakenly suggests that you could simply take it off one day. Butler rightly disagrees with that impression.

What surprised me, though, is how different it is from how I’ve been thinking about privilege. Indeed for me the benefit of using the word privilege is that it indicates how power materially and discursively shapes one’s empirical worldview. That is part of what I developed in my dissertation and forthcoming book on maps. Butler is famous, among other things, for theorizing performativity, including (to give a potted history of an entire subfield) how gender is a performance. Gender isn’t a given. Instead it’s something that we do/say, that we reinforce over and over again in every moment, but also something that changes with every new performance.

In combination with that, I would say that privilege extends the literature on performativity. It demonstrates how that kind of performance is shaped in particular contexts and through particular perspectives that are formed through privilege. Privilege then can be both social/material context and the ways that it infuses everything. It also can be performed in the sense, for example, of assuming something about someone else based on past experiences. Privilege also can grant one the ability to not see something, such as everyday racism, to not have to engage with it, to not be affected by it. For the privileged (and in important ways I fall into that category, although in other ways I do not), we don’t have to actively try to be racist. To be racist, white people only have to do nothing about racism. Privilege, then, is the privilege to not be affected yourself, and to do nothing. That’s because racism, and privileging whiteness, particularly in Europe and North America, is the default, the fallback, and the norm. There is a large body of academic work on white privilege, and the incredibly valuable writings of Sara Ahmed on being a killjoy as a response to oppression, including thorugh the narrow “diversity work” of many universities.

Cedric Yarbrough as Kenneth Clements in Speechless

Sublimated Selves

Studies of popular culture are also helpful in making racial privilege visible to those of us who have it. To that end, I’ve also been thinking about a trope that crops up often in popular culture. I am referring of course to the magical negro (MN).The MN trope reclaims the offensive and outdated racist term negro, using it critically in order to reference the enduring economic, social, and political subordination of people of color by whites. It’s been written about by academic researchers like Zuleyka Zevallos as well as Glenn and Cunningham, journalists like Tomi Obaro. In fiction and literary criticism, importantly by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu.

Please note: The above list is by no means exhaustive, but much of what I talk about in this section of the post comes from their work. So particularly with respect to MBPs, please read and cite the authors I link to, both above and below, before you would read or cite me. (That’s assuming anyone gets this far in the post.)

So, in light of systemic racism, the section below, which is on the MN trope first requires one caveat. It is difficult to reclaim a racist term from a position of racial privilege, like my own. So I will refer to the trope as the ‘magical Black person’ or MBP throughout. This use is not in any way a criticism of the original MN and its use by scholars and activists of color. Instead, while still drawing on their foundational work, I’ll use MBP as an attempt to acknowledge that, as a white scholar, it does not have the same satirical effect if I were to repeatedly employ a racist term. For I cannot reclaim ownership over a term that white people have long used to achieve drastically discriminatory ends. I think MBP is less interesting of a term than MN, and perhaps that is fitting, in this context.

The literature on MBPs has far reaching import. It provides a cogent illustration of how a character might be fully incorporated into a narrative, yet nonetheless in a way that renders it into a subordinate role. It also demonstrates the extra-discursive pressures that can be placed, in particular contexts, upon those who challenge their appointed role. In comparison with openly negative stereotypes, such as those of African-American women and men, MBPs appear to be positive. But as many have pointed out: positive stereotypes are still stereotypes. (I’m looking at you, noble savage.)Analysis of MBPs highlights the deeper concerted lack of creativity and heterogeneity in seemingly positive depictions of African-American characters in US popular culture.

Further popularized by Spike Lee, MBPs are Black fictional characters whose sole function in a narrative is to ‘magically’ help whites. The critical use of the MBP trope therefore provides a cogent critique of fictional narratives that, on their surface, appear to celebrate the contributions of African Americans but who nonetheless systemically, through the repetition of stock characters in subordinate roles. Although cast in a positive light, such roles refrain from ever allowing Black characters to break out of historical stereotypes and move into a focal and individuated role in the script. Examples of MBP characters include Bubba Gump in Forrest Gump, Morpheus in The Matrix trilogy, and a long list of African American characters in films based on books by Stephen King, including Dick Hallorann, the cook in The Shining. MBPs have also been lampooned, including through the character Kenneth Clements, played by actor Cedric Yarbrough, in the TV comedy Speechless.

MBPs are generally provided with only minor character development and backstory. They often appear to be elevated, or even venerated for their magical properties, they remain subordinate because they do little other than assist the development of the white characters who remain the focus of the story. To make matters worse, often once the white character is saved through the—generally underappreciated—labor of the MBP, then the latter either dies or drops out of the narrative without comment. Part of this results from resistance to changing narrative structures that almost always revolve around a white male lead. Instead diversity is included only through supporting characters, that are viewed as expendable as a way to create drama and move the story forward. Racial diversity is used as an add-on, then, to add interest without broadening the narrative.

Many authors who draw attention to these concerns are themselves avid observers of, and contributors to, popular culture, however, so the focus tends less to be upon criticizing individual works per se, than upon showing the pattern of repeated stereotypes in order to open up the possibilities for a wider variety of narratives. The MN focuses on African American characters, but there are variations and additional tropes for different groups, although the (intersectional) specifics of race, gender, and class all matter. To give a few exasmples, commenters have also noted “magical Asians” and, in critiques of gender, related tropes like the “manic pixie dream girl” who is used solely to spark the development of a male lead manic pixie dream girl. Traditionally, lesbian characters also nearly always die before the end of the story.

Minions as literal background

Magical Minions

This existing cultural scholarship on racism in popular culture in Europe and North America also points the way to an analysis of how international, including international-indigenous, characters are depicted in popular media. Building on the work on MBPs, I’ve been thinking about a related trope, that so far I’ve been calling the magical minion (MM). Here the term minion refers to how some characters are depicted as lesser than others. It is not in any way meant to suggest that the groups these characters are actually somehow less than others, but rather to criticize the fact that they’re routinely portrayed in an unimaginative and stereotyped way.

Whereas MBPs focuses on Black American characters, and particularly in the US media, magical minions can refer to the ways that international characters are narrowly incorporated into the dominant media. Many of these ways are easily recognizable to anyone who’s ever seen a cartoon or popular film. One thing that’s notable is that all kinds of supposed “foreignness” tend to be lumped together, particularly in the US and UK popular media. So MMs might include first-generation immigrants, such as Apu and Majula, the owners of the convenience store in The Simpsons. But they also can include indigenous characters that are presented in a way that is intended to be read as ‘charmingly and benignly foreign’ to people of privilege. Such characters need not be from a current or historical country. The political concerns about stereotyping someone from an existing nation are sometimes avoided by creating fictional nations and races. Examples of this include the minions from the Despicable Me franchise, the oompa-loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, house elves and bankers in the Harry Potter series, Oods in Dr. Who, dwarves in Snow White, and elves in the Wizard of Oz series and depictions of Santa’s workshop.

Fantasy literature includes a host of invented races and nationalities who conform to the MM trope to varying degrees. They include the dwarves and elves of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, demons and vampires in Buffy the Vampire, and the race-species hybrids in video games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft. There are also relevant stand-alone characters, including Short Round from the Indiana Jones trilogy, Passepartout in Around the World in 80 days and Queequeg in Moby Dick. There are also books that turn this around and reclaim characters that, in other works, have either been left out of many narratives or, where included, as MMs. Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account is an engrossing effort to turn this narrative around by telling the story from the point of view of Mustafa, or Estebanico, a North African slave who traveled with Cabeza de Vaca.

Like MBPs, the MMs occupy a prominent, but ultimately subordinate, role. They help the main character without explanation or self-interest, often dying immediately after they offer their help. Likewise, in the narratives their assistance doesn’t necessarily spring from training or expertise, or from self-knowledge or indigenous knowledge, but rather is simply miraculously endowed. They often have their own (possibly unintelligible to a general audience) language or theme song and may lack consistent gender roles. MMs also may have little to no backstory, although in contrast to MBPs, there often is a greater level of explanation provided, partly to explain the context and composition of the fictional, or at least fictionalized, race or culture to which the MMs belong.

Also in contrast to MBPs, in cases where there are multiple MMs, they tend to appear as a multitude, a sort of collective sidekick with little more than hints or token forms of individuality. As such, individual ‘minions’ are treated as being more or less interchangeable, and this lack of individual personality, combined with a transgression of gendered and social roles, is frequently used as a source of humor. In this way, they also serve to contrast with, and satirize, the main character’s generally more sober struggle towards self-discovery and individualism, even as they actively support its development.

As with MBPs, the goal of pointing out such similarities, which occur across a huge variety of works, is precisely to suggest that, even among imaginative and innovative narratives, nonetheless there are far more possibilities for more varied imaginations. When taken out of popular media and applied to international regulation, the MMs indicate how the definition of equality is more equal for some than for others. It’s even more equal for some MMs than others, as can be seen for example comparing the level of geographic specificity of MMs who are people of color with MMs depicted as white. Or we could also compare MMs said to be from countries in the global South (whose country of origin often isn’t even stated) with countries in Europe (like Üter Zörker, the stereotyped German character in The Simpsons, who interestingly was made to be Swiss in the German version, so that his foreignness could be preserved).

Orange face instead of Black face does not racial justice make.

The thing about such narratives is that for the privileged, they seem to be equal or even celebratory of all the characters, even while some characters are repeatedly shoehorned into a more subordinate role than others. For example, personally, the above image from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory filmlooks increasingly disturbing, the more I look at it, but that’s not at all how the oompa-loompas seemed back when I was a child watching the film. That ability to not be troubled by something is an instance of privileged blindness of the kind that people of color have long spoken and written about.

For although such narratives often involve a group of characters working towards a common goal, some group members must accept a role as minions in order to even appear in the narrative. Yet even within the formulation of MMs offered here, there are many methods for defining and incorporating subordinate characters that fit this trope. They can be more or less individuated, more or less integral, more or less nuanced.

So to go back to privilege, I don’t see terms like performativity and inequality don’t fully account for this. That’s one reason why, for what it’s worth, I use the term privilege and think it’s sorely needed. An analysis of privilege—in this case, an intersection of geographic (such as being from the US and Europe) and racial (white) privilege—allows some of us to get away with not being personally affected when an MM comes on screen, to not see, or less easily see, how stereotyped MMs are. They appear to be equal, but they instead resolutely unjust, albeit in varied ways. By contrast, actors who are people of color and/or from the global South have to see them, because they’re forced to contend with a paltry number of uninteresting side roles.

That said, the literature on performance, with its focus on repetition, is also useful here. Because it’s particularly through their very repetition to the exclusion of all other kinds of characters that MMs hurt actual people, by shaping privileged perceptions what internationals people are capable of, what their role can or should be in society, and by shaping employment in media as well.All of that is more than enough to try to think differently and encourage those writing new stories, who are largely still excluded from the dominant media despite some strides being made. For MMs don’t do justice to the characters who are forced into the minion role, while reinforcing privileged blindness. On top of that, they’re also really boring.

]]>jessbierKenneth Clements_Speechlessminions-despicable-me-hd-1234818oompa-loompas.jpgThe Feminizing City?https://jessbier.org/2017/03/20/the-feminizing-city/
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:42:24 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=986Continue reading The Feminizing City?→]]>Check out this great workshop and lecture (May 18, Amsterdam) on post-Fordist gender, labor, and the city with Linda Peake, organized by Marguerite van den Berg & Carmen Ferri. Willem Boterman and I will be responding.

For the workshop, email registration is required, and instructions are here. Entry is free, and lunch and coffee will be provided.

I’ve just returned from an excellent Algorithm Studies Network workshop on the island of Sandhamn in Sweden (photos at center and top left). It was organized by Francis Lee and Lotta Björklund Larson, and after every talk they asked us to write our impressions and ideas on sticky notes that were then collected and organized into groups (photo at bottom left).

One of the things that came up again and again on the sticky notes was the question of epistemology–namely how to study algorithms, which extend across individual case studies and are routinely defined so broadly as to include almost any set of instructions.

In discussions like these, I always find myself butting up against the limits of my own imagination, like Averroes, or the author himself, in J.L. Borges’s story “Averroes’ Search“. Because studying algorithms is also to participate in a transnational tradition whose scope is itself difficult to imagine.

Although they are associated with the internet and big data, algorithms stretch back at least as far as the 9th century Muslim mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwarizmi introduced Europe to the numerals still used today (0, 1, 2, … , 9) and his work is the ultimate source of the terms algorithm and algebra.

Al-Khwarizmi lived and worked in Baghdad. While in Sweden, I was reminded that roughly three hundred years later, in the 11th century, Scandinavian travelers (think: vikings) journeyed, under the leadership of a man called “Ingvar, to Baghdad in the area controlled by the Abbasid Caliphate, which they called “Serkland”.

One of the rune stones for a traveler who went with Ingvar was found in 1990 (photo at far right), during the construction for the airport that serves Stockholm. The stone was made as a siblings’ tribute to their brother who perished “in the East”, and it’s described in the popular book, Beyond the Northlands.

No one would know about such journeys today if it weren’t for various clues, including accounts in the sagas and 20-30 rune stones that were erected by their family members after those in the expedition all died, many of them in present-day Russia, without ever reaching Baghdad. At least, scholars think they all died because they just don’t have any evidence of someone surviving and returning home. It could be that the travelers stayed in Baghdad or Jerusalem and became part of life there. Later viking warriors did as much in Constantinople.

My point in bringing up Ingvar is not to romanticize travel or globalization in its many forms, but instead to point out how different ideas of history would be if those rune stones were not put up, and to think about all of the things that happened that were not memorialized, or whose memorials have been lost.

For example, think about how many pop science articles make reference to “our human ancestors” or prehistoric times to support claims about sociology or human psychology. Technology and algorithmic practices are presented as overwhelming for people who, it is claimed, deep down are just “cavemen” (and implicitly, in common sexist fashion, “cavewomen”) who originated in simpler times.

But we actually know so little about prehistory that I’m deeply skeptical of any justification that uses an oversimplified imagination of prehistory. Scholars have vastly more evidence for figures like al-Khwarizmi and the Scandinavian travelers to Baghdad than for others, and even so there is very little evidence at all.

Even in ancient societies that came long after prehistory (if far before al-Khwarizmi) like Ancient Egypt or Greece, and where life was painstakingly documented in writing and art, there are enormous gaps in knowledge. Studying algorithms makes me realize that much of the present is equally unknown.

]]>jessbierClose up of a hotel emergency map, black boxes representing hotel rooms on a white background, with a thick green line representing an escape route, with an arrow to the stairs, and an orange sticker in one room that says "Här är Du" (You are Here in Swedish)A close up of large yellow, orange, and pink sticky notes stuck in two piles to a whiteboard, with other sticky notes at the edges of the photo. The note at the top of the bottom pile says "How to Study/Approach them" and the note at the tops just says "EPISTEMICS"A picture of the Swedish island of Sandhamn, showing a fence cutting through the foreground of grass with scattered snow, in front of two red and white wooden houses and two large pine trees that stretch to the top and out of the frame.A close up of a viking memorial stone, with red runes carved into the rock.Sherlock Explains It Allhttps://jessbier.org/2016/10/18/sherlock-holmes-explains-it-all/
Tue, 18 Oct 2016 16:19:46 +0000http://jessbier.org/?p=718Continue reading Sherlock Explains It All→]]>“From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link to it.”

“By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.”

–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet. In the story it’s presented as a quotation from “The Book of Life”, a magazine article by Sherlock Holmes

It’s fashionable to look down on the humanities and social science. Even popular scientific celebrities like Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking have gotten in on the action of disparaging philosophy—and by extension, social research more broadly. Science and technology certainly have considerable power, and no one denies it. But in a world that is riven with war and injustice, the disavowal of philosophy and social theory among scientists, popular science wonks, and tech gurus seems less like the triumph of science than the masters of a fully ‘natural’ world running scared from the complications of the social and social-natural ones. To start to explain what critical research, and particularly critical research on society, can contribute to broader debates, it helps to look at one genre of popular fiction where research takes a central role: cop shows and detective fiction.

Researchers are often compared to detectives. Doing research, it could be argued, is akin to selecting facts within a large body of information, putting them together, and formulating a sequence of events, thereby uncovering some concrete, particular, and preexisting truth. In the opening quote, Doyle suggests that, from a drop of water, a good detective or a good scientist could scientifically extrapolate the entire Atlantic Ocean. This is certainly a particular view of science that might be unfamiliar to many scientists, but it’s particularly jarring for critical researchers. For many critical researchers, this is not how it works. Rather than uncovering facts that pertain to a murder that has clear victims and perpetrators, we are left with questions, each of which invites a critical analysis of the concepts it uses. You might spend a fair amount of time coming to understand different conceptions of murder in different societies, including for example the relationship of murder to the killings in war, before beginning to analyze whether it was even useful for a particular person to say that a particular murder had taken place.

Holmes and Watson in 221B Baker Street in a still from the Sherlock

Why do all this work? Because however useful empirical facts might be in many cases, as they certainly are, there are times when the ‘facts’ are nothing but a distraction. So doing otherwise than continuing to question the facts would be to simply accept the dominant conceptions of society and ideological explanations of events. This move is fundamentally problematic, particularly in societies like the US, for example, where systemic racism pervades the criminal justice system and people of color are regularly killed by police who, for their part, are rarely charged with murder. In such a context, as well as in others, it is vital to ask the question, “What is murder?” that is typical critical analyses but may be left out, or their answers are assumed, from detective work that is focused on finding a murderer, more than on understanding who gets to decide which killings are murders and which are not. However, it helps to have some further comparison between critical research and detective work in order to better understand how heterogeneous the former can be.

Holmes and Watson in 221B Baker Street in a still from the films starring Basil Rathbone

Sherlock Holmes continues to fascinate, and he is interesting here precisely because he is presented as a rational scientist, but a scientist of sorts whose object of study includes society. The heterogeneous chaos that reigns in his and Watson’s apartment at 221b Baker Street, which becomes a character of its own, is representative of this context of Holmes as a scientist of society. Holmes has a telescope and a chemistry bench for doing lab experiments, but he also has a book and newspaper archive, a punching bag, a pistol, and a violin. As such, his apartment is a model, a grab-bag of emblematic activities of Victorian society that included science, literature, sports, and the arts. Although this is done partly because it’s funny, even so the Sherlock Holmes stories must have been oddly comforting for many middle and upper-class Victorian readers in the UK. The social transformations of the turn of the twentieth century must have been rather disorienting for people who were raised with the idea that the world was ordered, and that everyone had a rigidly defined place in it. (Not coincidentally, to them, their own place was the best one). Furthermore, the world wasn’t just ordered, but it derived all of its meaning from this order. So a world without order was a world without purpose.

In the midst of a maelstrom of social change, the character of Sherlock emerges as a clairvoyant interpreter. His ‘magical’ inductions are the work of reason whose knowledge and networks are so vast that they only seem magical. Don’t worry, he seems to imply: society is not fully disordered. It’s only that the social order has become so complicated that it takes a genius to understand it. But nonetheless, the order is still there. This helps to explain why the misfit Holmes could seem soothing to readers who founded their identity upon an already obsolete social order. As Christopher Clausen points out, despite his eccentricities, for a Victorian reader “Holmes is rarely or never threatening, however, because his potentially corrosive intellect never questions the basic assumptions of his society” (Clausen 1984, 115). He seeks out the guilty individuals, not the guilty institutions behind them.

Holmes and Watson in 221B Baker Street in a still from the films starring Robert Downey, Jr.

The order that Holmes represents is that of reason, and scientific reason, which Doyle characterizes as “the scientific use of the imagination” (cited in Clausen 1984, 120). In this particular imagination, the world, social as well as scientific has laws, and these laws operate according to reason. It’s only that the reasons aren’t as clear cut as they once were. Holmes must deduce social logic from aspect like those noted above: fingernails, coat sleeves, callouses, expression, and shirt cuffs. But the deftness required only further validates the belief that, amidst all of this, order must and will always exist. If someone has callouses on their hands then, according to the purported logic of society, then there is some non-random rational explanation, and this can be deduced from a knowledge of society. Holmes might conclude: the person is a manual laborer. Similarly, and offensively to many contemporary readers, Holmes is able to understand the stories and motivations of women, servants, and other oppressed peoples, for example. In this formulation, their clues are just as clear and open to deduction as those of the white men of similar, dominant socio-economic background as Holmes (or Doyle) himself.

Holmes and Watson in The Brownstone in a still from Elementary

Holmes certainly benefitted from deep and intricate ethnographic knowledge about the Victorian UK. However, his position as a middle or upper-class white male who engaged primarily, though certainly not exclusively with other similarly situated white males shaped his knowledge of that society. As such, his particularly narrow practice of social-scientific deduction elides differences, and particularly different understandings of people and events among different groups in society. Yet even if he had even wider exposure beyond the UK and within it, his cannot be solved by further encyclopedic knowledge of society, because part of its myopia stems from the notion of an encyclopedia, a rigid ordering of society itself. That is precisely where the understanding of a researcher as detective fails, and where critical research has the most to offer.

To do critical research is recognize that you are yourself intervening, making connections that may or may not be causal, among disparate elements, which may or may not be suspects or even people, to recast a phenomena, which may or may not be a crime or even an event, in such a way that it may become completely unrecognizable, and indeed even the act of recognition itself comes into question as one that has its own politics. This politics in turn has inspired a critical literature in studies of liberal multiculturalism. Clausen points out that Holmes’s knowledge of philosophy (and by extension, Doyle’s) was ‘Nil’ (Clausen 1984, 108). But as philosophers would be quick to tell you, a lack of knowledge of philosophy isn’t ‘no philosophy’, it’s just an unreflexive and unimaginative one. So much the worse for everyone.